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The Power of Bach, the Comfort of Morricone

The indomitable Brazilian conductor João Carlos Martins has faced tremendous hurdles, his career as a pianist derailed by a soccer injury, repetitive stress syndrome, a tumor in his left hand and a mugging that left him unable to use his right arm.

Speaking from the stage after a concert at Avery Fisher Hall on Sunday evening with the Filarmônica Bachiana, an ensemble he founded in 2004, Mr. Martins, 70, recalled what he termed the worst day of his life, during a stint in the hospital. He found solace, he said, in Ennio Morricone’s music for “Cinema Paradiso,” which he heard when he turned on the television that day.

As an encore, Mr. Martins (performing as pianist) and the orchestra offered excerpts from “Cinema Paradiso” and the “Gabriel’s Oboe” theme from Mr. Morricone’s score for “The Mission.” The second encore, Mateus Araújo’s arrangement of the Brazilian national anthem (composed by Francisco Manuel da Silva), had many in the enthusiastic Portuguese-speaking audience on their feet.

Mr. Martins, who received an ovation as he took the stage, opened the concert with a full-blooded interpretation of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” from Bach’s Cantata No. 147 in an arrangement by Charles J. Roberts. Bach was always an important element of Mr. Martins’s career as a pianist, and he often performed and recorded Bach’s music before his setbacks.

Photo

João Carlos Martins leading Filarmônica Bachiana in Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras No. 7 at Avery Fisher Hall on Sunday.Credit
Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

The program also included an orchestral transcription of another Bach chorale: Edmundo Villani-Côrtes’s version of “Awake, the Voice Commands,” a showcase for the ensemble’s glowing strings.

Bach strongly influenced several prominent South American composers, including Heitor Villas-Lobos of Brazil and Alberto Ginastera of Argentina. The Brazilian pianist Arthur Moreira Lima was the able soloist in Ginastera’s Piano Concerto No. 1, which blends 12-tone technique, Argentine dance rhythms and other folk and classical idioms.

Mr. Lima, also 70 and a childhood friend of Mr. Martins’s, has emerged from a performing hiatus by giving piano recitals in Brazil’s remote interior, using the back of a semitrailer truck as a stage. Sunday’s performance was their first collaboration in North America in 30 years.

The second half of the program concluded with a vivacious reading of Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras No. 7, one of a series of nine suites in which the composer fuses Brazilian folk, popular and dance idioms with Bach’s contrapuntal and harmonic structures.

A version of this review appears in print on September 21, 2010, on Page C3 of the New York edition with the headline: The Power of Bach, the Comfort of Morricone. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe